Physical techniques used for attacking and reverse engineering modern semiconductor devices may include device thinning as part of sample preparation. In many cases, the device may be thinned at the backside (i.e. the bottom) of the device, rather than the top, during reverse engineering and security attacks. For instance, it may be necessary to thin the device in order to enable optical attack techniques. Referring as an example to a device that includes embedded logic, memory and so forth, an optical attack may be capable of changing the state of a logic cell, reading logic states, or increasing the current consumption of the logic cell dependent on the state thereof, so that the increase in current consumption may be measured in order to determine the logic cell state. Thinning may also be referred to as de-processing. An example of de-processing may be layer by layer de-processing for reverse engineering or other attacks. De-processing may be a process used to understand the structure of the device, by removing layers and imaging them, then re-building the device structural and connection and logical schemes. Additionally or alternatively, de-processing may be used as a preparation stage for device editing and other attacks.